Ruto at crossroads as youth bulge risks show works
The explosion of countrywide protests by young people has been a long time coming. Politicians have always buried their heads in the sand. For them, it is business as usual. After all, they are never affected by a tough economy. They live in a bubble!
Kenya has long been warned that the youth bubble held immense promise and huge danger. Immense promise in that the youthful population is a huge reservoir of well-educated and ambitious youth who can take the country forward. That same energy, if not productively channelled, can destroy a country.
Youth unemployment became a crisis in the disastrous years of President Daniel arap Moi, who left the economy devastated. Lack of jobs left millions of young people idling in towns countrywide. Most were eking out a living in the jua kali sector. Hopelessness defined the youth. They left the country in droves.
President Mwai Kibaki’s free primary education, expansion of the university system, and emphasis on developing Kenya as an ICT hub created a band of tech-savvy youth, having a high level of awareness, integrated, ambitious, and well educated. Kibaki brought hope with his expansion of economic opportunities and helping put money in people’s pockets.
He did this without the crisis the blundering government’s economic management team is visiting on Kenyans today. The distinction is that Kibaki’s economic management focused on the interests of the country, and refrained from selfish expenditures.
The tenure of President Uhuru Kenyatta saw a downturn in the economy. It was during Uhuru’s tenure that Generation Z (Gen-Z) started graduating from educational institutions. With the economy suffering, jobs became scarce, pending bills piled up, and the youth started losing hope. The exodus of young people began again in earnest.
Uhuru tried to address the challenges through youth schemes like Kazi kwa Vijana to keep young people productively engaged, and resisted widespread tax increases when people were struggling to generate incomes.
President William Ruto came in with huge promises to reset the economy in favour of the people, the so-called bottom-up approach that he has apparently since abandoned. The youth, now predominantly Gen-Z, got new hope. Unfortunately for him, it is during his tenure that the warnings about the dangers of the youth bulge have come to fruition. But instead of taking a step back to rethink his disastrous strategy, President Ruto has doubled down on taxation. This will not end well.
The President must change course. He has no option. The country is hurtling towards a cliff edge. Every President has had a defining moment for their presidency. Indeed, Kibaki faced two crises - the 2005 referendum fiasco, and the 2007 post-election violence. Kibaki steered Kenya back from the edge by focusing on the economy, and making the concessions necessary to rejuvenate it. Bullheadedness will not work!
This column has time and again called on the President and his economic advisers to immediately craft and roll out an economic recovery strategy. He needs to drop his obsession with flogging a dead horse (trying to milk more taxes from a dead economy). He can term the strategy ‘Operation Restore Hope’. Currently, Kenyans only see a very bleak future!
For Ruto’s presidency, this is a defining moment. For starters, he needs a whole new slew of advisers, not the current crowd of cheerleaders who have been giving badly struggling Kenyans the middle finger. Second, the IMF are not your friends. They push you to strangle your countrymen, and then fly out as it burns. Pull back before it is too late! Third, Kenyans are wondering why all this canoodling with G7 leaders and heads of the biggest global corporations is yielding nothing. Who is fooling who?
How the President manages to steer Kenya out of the current crisis and restore hope will determine how the rest of his presidency will pan out – or whether he becomes a one-term President. In 2027, Gen-Z will rule the ballot box!
